The Nature of Things. …These paintings are not landscape paintings. Because there aren’t any landscapes up there, not in the old, tidy European sense...Instead there’s a tangle, a receding maze, in which you can become lost almost as soon as you step off the path…No matter how far back in you go, there will be more. [i] These landscapes are psychological. Cluttered and chaotic, consuming and shameful, vertiginous and sublime, Colin Dorward’s oil paintings present piles of miscellany related to the business of living. Teetering and tumbling, spiralling endlessly in on themselves, these super­saturated sites of stuff simultaneously suggest an inescapable guilt towards glut, and the need to find order in it all. They visualize inundation, how it feels to be overcome, an exhaustion towards existence. Alluding to cyclical behaviour, they suggest a loss of control and a sinful desire to hoard, of being bound by, bound up in and bound to the substance of life. His watercolours multiply this cacophony, breaking it into kaleidoscopic variants that loop like bent circuits. Techno and spastic, they replay themselves ad infinitum, dissolving and rebuilding, yet resisting total disintegration by way of their circular substructures. This controlled frenzy points to a desire to make sense of the conundrum of consumption, to somehow rein in its begotten anxieties and to find serenity in the nature of things. [i] Margaret Atwood, ‘Death by Landscape,’ Wilderness Tips (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1991), 128­129. Rhiannon Vogl